Laser radars are established in prior art teachings for determining flight vehicle attitude or range with automatic laser trackers, related receivers, and retroreflectors. In the "Radar Handbook" by M. I. Skolnik, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970, Chapter 37 discloses laser radars in detail. For example, pages 37-62 show laser tracking interconnected with a computer and tracking mount. In describing motion of a flight vehicle the variables that are involved are related to the vehicle position, roll rate, and attitude rates. Prior techniques of measuring these variables have used radar or laser radar and triangulation with three or more ground stations or high speed camera trackers and triangulation from three or more camera stations.
Attitude of a flight vehicle has also been obtained using two laser transmitter/receiver stations tracking of skewed reflectors on a vehicle. A single laser transmitter/receiver station will track skewed retroreflectors in sequence on the vehicle to determine the position, roll rate, and attitude in one plane, this plane being defined by the vehicle roll axis and the ground station. As the vehicle rotates each plane of retroreflected energy sweeps the ground station at a timed interval dependent upon the attitude of the vehicle. The reflector alignment on the surface of the vehicle is known and the roll rate is measured by a signal reflected from one of the skewed retroreflectors on the vehicle. These reflected laser pulses are detected and processed to resolve the position, roll and attitude (pitch and yaw) data. This skewed reflector method of measurement allows attitude of a flight vehicle to be determined with only two tracking stations, and is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,047,816 issued to Kynric M. Pell et al. Pell et al also derive the simplified mathematical representation for expressing the information using a right hand cartesian coordinate system, as shown in columns 3, 4, and 5 thereof.